When it comes to Thomas Friedman’s all-too-often misguided and
misleading commentary on the Middle East, and especially on the Arab-
Israel conflict, one must keep in mind that even a stopped clock is
right twice a day. In his New York Times article of April 4 (“A
Middle East Twofer”), Friedman does offer one accurate insight into
the psyche of Israel’s population: Israel can accommodate a
Palestinian state on its border only when Israelis can feel
strategically secure. Everything else in his article is so inaccurate
that it borders on mendacity.

He starts off with praise for Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian
terrorist leader serving five consecutive life sentences for the
murder of many Israelis in terror attacks. Friedman considers
Barghouti to be “the most authentic leader Fatah has produced.” He
is right. Barghouti is one of the most, if not the most, authentic of
all Palestinian leaders living today. But Friedman fails to note, or
fails to mention, that Barghouti’s authenticity, and his popularity
with the Palestinian rank-and-file, arise from his success at killing
Israelis and his ability to plan and execute lethal terror attacks.

Yet this “authenticity,” festooned as it is with the blood and gore
of hundreds of Israelis shot or stabbed or blown up or burned alive,
inspires Friedman to place great confidence in Barghouti’s call, from
his jail cell, for non-violent civil disobedience; even though, as
Friedman envisions it, this “non-violence” can include throwing rocks
and waging economic and political war and lawfare against Israel.

He neglects to ask if Israelis share his confidence in such
an “authentic” leader. He fails to note the real purpose of Arab
economic and political warfare against Israel, the goal of lawfare,
and the life-threatening potential of stone-throwing. For Palestinian
leadership, and for much leadership of Arab countries, the end-game
goals of all of these endeavors do not include peace with Israel.
Rather they are part of the 65-year war waged for the destruction of
Israel and its replacement with “Palestine.” How did Friedman miss
these critical points?

He misses a similar critical point when he urges the Palestinians to
offer Israel a peace plan in the form of a “map delineating how, for
peace, they would accept getting back 95 percent of the West Bank and
all Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, and would swap the other 5
percent for land inside pre-1967 Israel.” What he fails to note, or
neglects to mention, is that the Palestinian leadership from Arafat
to Abbas to Hamas have already done that. As Arafat so quaintly put
it decades ago:

Since we cannot defeat Israel in war we do this in stages. We take
any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish
sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When
the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final
blow against Israel.

And it is not just Arafat. Numerous Hamas and PA leaders have said
the same thing.

-“Palestine is a Muslim land …we do not recognise the sovereignty of
Jews on a hand-span of our country.”

-“Our fate from Allah is to be the vanguard in the war against the
Jews until the resurrection of the dead.”

-“The Jews are the Jews…therefore it is necessary to slaughter them
and murder them…..kill them….have no mercy on the Jews, murder them
everywhere”

-“The day of resurrection will not come until the victory of the
believers over the descendents of monkeys and pigs, with their
annihilation.”

But enough about the Jews. What about plans for the future of peace
with Israel?

-“The Zionist entity will be destroyed within the first quarter of
this century.”

-“[T]here is no place for the state of Israel on this land.”

-“When we speak of Jerusalem it does not mean that we have forgotten
about … Jaffa or Acre (Israeli cities)….from a religious point of
view Palestine from the sea to the river is Islamic.” Any room for
Israel in that vision?

-“Even if agreements were signed regarding Gaza and the West Bank, we
will not forget (the Israeli cities and regions of) Haifa, Acre,
Jaffa, the Galilee Triangle, and the Negev. It is only a question of
time.” Time for what; congenial cooperation?

-“All of the agreements….are temporary.” Good to know this in advance.

-“We exaggerate when we say ‘peace’…what we are speaking about
is ‘hudna,’ a temporary ceasefire.” Temporary till when?

Such rhetoric of annihilation accompanies hate-teach from
kindergarten up in PA schools. And their deeds match their words.

Then he suggests that if the Palestinians could capture the “moral
high ground” with a peace plan that accompanies their “non-violent
resistance,” Israel would suffer “moral insecurity” and be more
amenable to cooperation with the PA leadership.

But just how far up must Palestinian leaders climb to reach a “moral
high ground” from their current moral depths of hundreds of suicide
bombings; 12,000 qasam rockets; mass murder and attempted mass murder
of thousands of civilians; inculcation of Jew-hatred and suicidal
fervor in innocent Arab children; and incitement to genocide? And
how does waving a map facilitate this climb? And why would such a
map, proffered at this point in the history of the conflict, create
any “moral insecurity” among Israelis?

Barghouti’s mass-murder terror attacks took place in the immediate
aftermath of an Israeli peace offer that was not much different from
the new “map” that Friedman thinks the Palestinians should be
offering. Arab and PA leaders have rejected 31 peace offers since
1937, answering many with war and terrorism, and all with
rejectionism and threats of annihilation. Are the odds any better now
that Hamas, whose unabashedly ballyhooed purpose is the destruction
of Israel and the genocide of its Jews, is working to form a
coalition with the PA? It seems crystal clear that Israel loses no
moral high ground, experiences no moral insecurity, by being
suspicious.

Coming from an internationally recognized expert on the Middle East,
these errors and omissions raise obvious, but painful, questions.
Can he not know the Hamas-PA genocidal end game? Is he so ignorant of
this conflict’s history that he does not realize that Israel has
traded, or offered to trade, land for peace seven times in the past
65 years[i] only to discover belatedly that five of those seven were
actually “land for more terrorism” deals, and the other two trades
may now be headed down the same path?

He cannot not know. Yet he chooses not to include these disturbing
facts in his analysis. Why? Perhaps because of what the second of
his “twofers” reveals:

One reason the Arab world has stagnated while Asia has thrived is
that the Arabs had no good local models to follow — the way Taiwan
followed Japan or Hong Kong.

Why do Arabs need local models? Cannot the Arab world follow the
models of Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, or
Thailand? Moreover, there are local models: Turkey and Israel!

By pretending that Arab countries would be peaceful, flourishing
economies if only they had local models, Friedman has fabricated a
palpably transparent excuse for the deeply evil commitment of many
Arab leaders to the subordination of their nations’ economic
priorities (much to the detriment of their own people) to an endless
war against Israel until “victory or martyrdom.”

Making excuses for evil is complicity.

Complicity with evil is evil.

End Note
[i] 1. Territories conquered in the 1947-9 war, offered in exchange
for peace at the 1949 Rhodes Armistice conference. Arab leaders
rejected the offer, choosing instead to continue hostilities in the
form of terrorism.

2. Territories conquered in the 1967 war, offered in exchange for
peace at the UN in December 1967. Arab leaders rejected the offer,
declaring instead “No recognition, no negotiations, no peace.”

3. All of the Sinai to Egypt in 1982, in a peace agreement now on the
verge of being abrogated by the new Muslim Brotherhood-dominated
government in Cairo.

4. The Oslo Accords, 1993, in a “land for peace” deal that was really
a “land for Arafat’s launching what he hoped would be the last great
final jihad” deal.

5. Land east of the Jordan River to King Hussein of Jordan, 1994, in
a peace agreement now in question due to the instability of Hashemite
rule thanks to Muslim Brotherhood agitation in Jordan.

6. The withdrawal from Lebanon, 2000, which was supposed to be
Israel’s acquiescence to Hezbollah’s demand for Lebanese liberation;
but which instead empowered Hezbollah to take over Lebanon and use it
as a launching pad for terror attacks against Israel.